2050 11 6
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Last-minute women notice me and latch on, converging in narcotized spirals, old sunflowers twisting towards a fake light. Ugly, used up people, turning like dirty snow, terrified of facing the sunlight alone, of the hour long drunken drive home.
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20493616
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We sat under the broken umbrella, its flowered fabric hanging limp on one side. The rain fell softly at the edges of our backs. I kissed his hand, the one without fingers (not a casualty of his job, only of birth). My lips pressed what I couldn't say into his…
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20481212
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tonight's sky is full:/each lunatic to his moon/sings separate songs.
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204897
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This little town lost its mill...
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204811
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WIFE (calling back from kitchen): "Dick Cheney's penis!"
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204722
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These things were indeed the wealth of our respective nations.
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2046216
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"... he likes the hair starting to grow under my arms and he likes the smell there when my deodorant is wearing off. "
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204462
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Lady Macbeth goes around moaning “out, out damned spot,” when a well-placed lick would have solved the problem immediately, with no unnecessary and heavy-handed dialogue. Once again, clumsy work.
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20443021
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"My mother loses patience when I get sad," I said. "She tells me about the dog."
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20422521
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i could make swamp boys believe / under dust-sheets stiffened by ice
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20413929
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He looks in silence and he looks with longing.
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20392114
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The last time she wore fur-lined gloves...
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203975
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Voltaire drinks his coffee standing up in front of the microwave and he likes to hold one hand on his chest where his heart is while he drinks. He likes to feel his heartbeat quicken and then he imagines that he is a machine or something mechanical.
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2039119
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Garage-sale variety olive-green corduroy, elbow patches, hems too short. His jacket pocket produced answers one afternoon like strips of paper from cracked fortune cookies.
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203921
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Chusma de la Calle had the most beautiful scarves. Gentle, warm sheaths of silk she kept in a special drawer lined with tissue and rosehip sachets tucked in the corners. She had scarves of every color, but most were shades of her favorite, blue. …
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203852
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If I was going to liberate myself from my marriage to Rosie, the first step ought to be to liberate myself from my wedding band. That wasn't going to be easy. Along with the more prominent rolls of fat I'd been accumulating, my ring finger now bulged over the upper…
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203884
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At least, I think it was him. It sure looked like him.
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203855
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I made this robot. Everyone was making them. Mine was a vacuum cleaner with a rubber jack-o-lantern mask taped to the handle. His name was Z-Bot2131F, but I just called him Brady, after my dead brother. Brady, my brother, had come out cold, and…
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20351511
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Library life is full of surprises.
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20342916
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Moving is like moving upstream, like swimming underwater against a mighty current. You are salmon people: pink, vulnerable.
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20333423
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The happiness was a tablecloth for a picnic. The happiness was the carpet in the hallway. The happiness was the wall behind the painting. The happiness was the sky behind the cloud. The happiness was the seating in the Saab.
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2032147
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Are you there? It’s been so long since I had someone to talk to. Besides Oscar and Wilde, I mean. I feed them crumbs of bread. They’re my pet rats, my only friends. Besides you, of course. How kind of you to remember me! How shall I begin?
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20312121
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"... you shake your head and look down as if I am a mongrel dog who has pissed the Tabriz..."
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20313314
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"My, aren't you queery looking? She says.
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2030113
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Can I really be blamed? Look at the circumstantial evidence: you wore that skirt, which can hardly be called a skirt. More like a very wide plaid belt.
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20291710
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Eli the dog cocks his head like a pistol;
half cock, full cock.
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202921
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It was twilight, and the sky was getting darker even as the lights of civilization were becoming more noticeable in the gloom. The daytime city, with its grit and dust and texture, was disappearing. Soon there would only be electric light and neon and the
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202941
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I was about to answer when that something emerged from the woods. It was not an animal, after all, but a woman dressed all in brown. She approached our porch windows. I shuddered and turned away. But her coming was inevitable. When I turned back, she
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202611
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The neatly-gentrified Mtsensk District plaster buckled in all the right grey-painted places. The aged, yellowing windows rose and fell in fashionable decay. It was a well-upholstered citizen's slum, drawn to exacting state specifications. Local housing authorities…
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2026153
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You want to know what happened to him and your curiosity is a cat pawing at the edges of your impatience as you roam aggressively around your old haunts.
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